FEAST OF ST BENEDICT; 21st MARCH

 FEAST OF ST BENEDICT

21st MARCH



Dom Prosper Gueranger says, of St Benedict:
“Posterity had a right to know the life and virtues of a man, whose salutary influence upon the Church and society has been so observable during the ages of the Christian era. To describe the influence exercised by the spirit of St Benedict, we should have to transcribe the annals of all the nations of the western Church, from the seventh century down to our own times. Benedict is the father of Europe. By his Benedictines, numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sands of the sea-shore, he rescued the last remnants of Roman vigour from the total annihilation threatened by the invasion of barbarians; he presided over the establishment of the public and private laws of those nations, which grew out of the ruins of the Roman Empire; he carried the Gospel and civilisation into England, Germany and the northern countries, including Slavonia; he taught agriculture; he put an end to slavery; and to conclude, he saved the precious deposit of the arts and sciences from the tempest that would have left mankind a prey to a gloomy and fatal ignorance.
And Benedict did all this by that little book which we call his Rule. This admirable code of Christian perfection and prudence disciplined the countless legions of religious, by whom the holy patriarch achieved all these prodigies…..
An incredible number of saints, both men and women, who look up to Benedict as their father, purify and sanctify the world, which had not yet emerged from the state of semi-barbarism. A long series of Popes who had once been novices in the Benedictine cloister, preside over the destinies of this new world, and form for it a new legislation, which, being based exclusively on the moral law, is to avert the threatening prevalence of brutal despotism. Bishops innumerable, trained in the same school of Benedict, consolidate this moral legislation in the provinces and cities over which they are appointed….
For many centuries, the learned men, the doctors of the Church, and the instructor of youth, belong, almost exclusively, to the Order of the great patriarch, who, by the labours of his children, pours forth on the people the purest beauty of light and truth. This choir of heroes of every virtue, of Popes, of bishops, of apostles, of holy doctors, proclaiming themselves as his disciples, and joining with the universal Church in glorifying that God, whose holiness and power shine forth so brightly in the life and actions of Benedict – what a corona, what an aureola of glory for one saint to have!”
Dom Prosper Gueranger, "The Liturgical Year, Volume V, Lent", Loreto Publications, Fitzwilliam New Hampshire, AD 2013, at pp. 431-434.
Image: St Benedict receiving monks into the Benedictine Order, Lorenzo Monaco, National Gallery UK.

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